One particular situation is probably among the most difficult ones
for many users of Free Software operating systems, especially when
pure users are concerned. Assembling and installing the new hardware
was quickly done, but the included drivers are only for Windows.

Unless you've spent significant time on internet research before
buying hardware, so you could make an informed decision which hardware
to buy, now precious hours are lost trying to locate the right
driver. In especially unfortunate cases you will even come to realize
that this particular piece of hardware is not supported at
all. Outdated information, unmaintained links and discontinued
development of some drivers make the situation worse.

In fact often not every hardware vendor would even have to develop
each and every driver themselves. Often there are volunteers to help
developing drivers in their own interest. But in many cases, these
developers only receive very limited support. Even worse. Some
hardware vendors actively try to defend themselves against this
attempt at increasing their market potential.

Of course there are also more and more exceptions to that rule,
some hardware vendors are beginning to understand the potential of the
Free Software market and either try to provide drivers themselves or
further their development. Right now these are more or less exceptions
confirming the rule, however. But drivers written and distributed
exclusively by hardware vendors are really only the second best
solution.

Better would be a platform on which vendors develop and maintain
drivers together with interested companies and volunteers. This will
not only help keeping drivers maintained even years after the
production has been discontinued, it also becomes possible to use
synergies.

Many boards by different hardware vendors use identical
chipsets. So a lot of multiple work could be avoided. Also developing
drivers for multiple operating systems or allowing porting to a new
hard- or software-platform — creating a new sales market —
would be possible.

Hardware vendors willing to enter such a process would see a much
increased usability for their hardware in combination with a higher
customer retention based upon the knowledge that support will not be
suddenly discontinued in 1-2 years. Not to mention that the potential
market would grow.

The entry portal for such a system would have to be a database,
which allows searching for products of vendors in order to know about
the existing drivers and their status. So users would directly find
out whether drivers exist and whether they are for instance stable,
only suited for developers, orphaned and/or outdated.

Based on PHP, HTML and MySQL, Florian Duraffourg is aiming at
creating a driver database [5] specifically for GNU/Linux and
GNU/HURD. Anyone looking for a driver should then be able to find out
whether a driver exists and which status it has.

By means of a simple Web-access, this would also allow checking
directly before buying hardware in a store to see how well it is
supported. Florian also considers allowing direct server access, so
accessing the database would become possible without HTML and browser;
for instance with a simple client program on a wireless device like a
PDA or mobile telephone.

Thoughts and plans around this program are still under development,
so Florian still doesn't have a final domain or dedicated
server. Among his considerations was also to mirror all drivers on a
dedicated FTP server to slow linkrot and loss of information.

Right now his biggest concern is finding volunteers that would like
to contribute to development, designing the web site, translating
documents into different languages and assembling the driver
database.

目前，他最大的关切点在於寻找愿意贡献开发、设计网站、翻译文档到不同语言、以及组装起驱动程序资料库的志愿者。

This seems like an extremely useful project and I hope that many
volunteers will join the effort. Also some hardware vendors will
hopefully recognize their chance and support this project
directly.

Customers would know that they could shop as much as they wanted
without having to worry about lack of support. As a kind of additional
service they could even get a CD with the right drivers for the
hardware they just bought.

And due to customer retention they would be likely to buy their
other hardware that is often uncritical in terms of being supported,
like hard disks, cases, CPUs, memory from that company. So by
supporting the project above even the sales-oriented businesses could
gain substantial additional value.

According to Gilles, it was a major problem for development of 3D
applications that tools like a moving camera, snapshots, simple
coordinate systems — although classical and well-known —
are rarely part of 3D standard libraries. Even GLUT is using a much
lower abstraction level.

In comparison, libQGLViewer provides camera and objects, which can
be freely moved with the mouse within a 3D scenario. Also saving
snapshots in different formats including vector-based EPS is
possible.

The project is based on the QGLWidget class of the Qt library and
solely for the purpose of showing the refresh rate it is still using
GLUT. This dependency will disappear with the move to Qt 3.1,
however. The libQGLViewer itself was — like the Qt library
— written in C++.

The author is working in a graphics laboratory in which everyone
was creating their own 3D viewer in the past. Each solution had its
strengths, but none was complete. This is what Gilles sought to
change. Also he is teaching students and sought to allow them to get
creative more easily without having to spend much time on the
infrastructure.

Therefore Gilles began developing this project. Originally he
estimated it to be a weeks worth of work, but in the end it turned out
to be a full-time project for a whole year. By now he considers the
project to be finished, only the documentation could still need some
polishing by a native English speaker. Also some feedback for the
installation routine would be welcome.

Declaring the project finished was a conscious decision, by the
way. His declared goal was to keep the viewer as general as possible
without focussing on specific applications. Gilles is convinced to
have reached that limit, so he decided to not add any more substantial
new features.

According to its author, the most important advantages of the
project are its clean, portable and carefully design API, also the
library comes with complete documentation and a great amount of
commented examples. This makes it possible to generate a simple 3D
viewer within one minute and 10 lines of code.

Gilles also sought to emphasize what the libQGLViewer is not. It
does not do 3D rendering, because its sole purpose is to provide the
viewer — the "draw()" method remains the responsibility of the
user and a lot of possibilities exist to generate the
scenario. libQGLViewer then allows the user to enter these scenarios
and move within them.

The libQGLViewer is published as Free Software under the GNU
General Public License (GPL). Apparently there were numerous requests
to switch to the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) in order to also
allow proprietary applications. For personal and political reasons
Gilles decided to keep publishing the libQGLViewer under the GPL,
however.

Also he found the generally available information about licenses,
possible change of licenses and multi-licensing to be incomplete and
sometimes confusing. He is probaby not the only person feeling that
way, so it might be useful to write a little introduction into the
background.

In order to be able to understand the licenses, it helps to
understand the background on which they are built. Licenses like the
GNU General Public License (GPL) are Copyright-licenses, or Authorship
right ("Droit d'Auteur") licenses. Even though the terms Copyright and
Droit d'Auteur are almost the same for most practical purposes, some
historic differences exist.

In order to understand these, one has to know that Copyright is an
invention of the Gutenberg age, a result of inventing the printing
press around 1476. Originally being a pure monopoly for publishers it
wasn't intended to give authors any rights in their works. Only 1710
first authors can purchase rights in their own works.

The idea of a fundamental right of the author in his or her work
— the core of todays Droit d'Auteur — has been propagated
mostly by German and French philosophers in the time before the French
revolution and has first been implemented as a major achievement of
the French revolution.

This established the Droit d'Auteur as a new legal tradition in
order to replace the old, publisher-monopoly oriented system. Today,
essentially the continental European countries are following the Droit
d'Auteur tradition while the angloamerican area is still following the
Copyright tradition.

To create common international ground, there have been harmonizing
processes and agreements that are commonly referred to by the cities
of Berne and Stockholm in which they have come to pass in. Because of
this, most issues are practically not different despite the very
different basis. With one exception.

Contrary to Copyright, Droit d'Auteur knows a personality right of
the author, which — like other human rights — is
inalienable. Independent of what any contract says, the personality
rights of the author can never be limited. In fact, a contract that is
(seemingly or for real) trying to do this runs a risk of being
declared invalid in court.

Only the so-called exploitation rights are transferrable. There are
single and exclusive exploitation rights; the proprietor of the
exclusive exploitation rights can provide an unlimited amount of
single exploitation rights and defend his rights in court. So the
exclusive exploitation rights are for most practical purposes similar
to the angloamerican Copyright.

So based upon these exclusive exploitation rights and/or the
Copyright the owner of these rights can choose the license under which
the software is distributed. In the case of Free Software that means
choosing a Free Software license. [7]

As the owner of the exlusive exploitation rights/Copyright can
issue an unlimited amount of single exploitation rights (and therefore
licenses), it is of cause always possible to issue the same software
under several licenses. Whether these licenses are Free Software
licenses or proprietary makes no legal difference.

Should the exclusive exploitation rights be with several people,
because a piece of software has several authors and they have not
chosen to combine their rights with one fiduciary, for instance, of
cause all of these authors must agree with the licensing.

So the license is given by means of the exclusive exploitation
rights — which are more or less the same as the anglo-american
Copyright — as a single exploitation right.

所以许可证是以独占利用权的方式 — 或多或少与盎格鲁美洲版权相同 — 以单一利用权来〔加以〕给出。

It should be understood that only the owner of the exclusive
exploitation rights can also defend the license in court. Also
relicensing may become practically impossible if a large number of
authors has been working on a project.

In reaction to the publication of the FLA, some questions were
raise that should maybe be briefly addressed here.

反应了 FLA 的出版，一些或许应该要简短地在此说明的问题被提了出来。

One question raised a few times was whether the FLA should replace
the GPL. That is of course not the case, because the GPL is one
Copyright based license granted by means of the exclusive exploitation
rights, while the FLA is dealing with transfer of exclusive
exploitation rights, which is one level before the license.

Another question was with reference to the keeping the possibility
open for the assigning party to do dual-licensing, since the FLA is
retransferring an unlimited amount of single exploitation rights back
to the author. The question raised was whether it would be possible to
then enforce these licenses in court as the author is no longer holder
of the exclusive exploitation rights.

If you imagine this case, author A would assign her rights to the
FSF Europe and give a single, proprietary license to company B with
the contract clause of not passing this license and software on to
third parties. Now company C is selling software in which the software
of author A is obviously used in a proprietary way. What does this
mean?

There are two logical possibilities. Normally the software would be
published under the GNU General Public License by the FSF Europe, so
the first possibility would be that company C has violated the GPL by
using the software proprietary. Of course the FSF Europe would
investigate that. Only when company C provides written evidence that
they did not take the GPL version, but rather the proprietary version
of company B, they will be cleared of that suspicion.

In that case, company B has violated its contract with author A,
however. And the author of course still has the right to take legal
steps against contract violation. So the author can take legal steps
and cut the chain of transferral of rights in the transferral to
company B.

Of course I need to state explicitly that this will in doubt always
require intensive checking by an accredited and fully trained lawyer,
which I am not. But I do hope that I was successful in making the
overall picture clearer to non-lawyers without upsetting the experts
in legal issues with oversimplifying matters in their eyes.